How to Increase Your Stick Speed & Control on the Drums

Learn how to increase your stick speed and control from drum teacher Jason Gianni in this Howcast drum video.


One of the more important aspects of playing the drums is to increase your hand speed and your control. And as with a lot of topics, there's so many ways you could do this, with anything from studying rudiments, which basically are your what would be scales to piano rudiments are to drums, to picking up books that are aimed at developing your hands. There's very famous book called "Stick Control" by George Stone that gives you a variety of hand exercises and repetitive techniques to go over to increase your hand speed and control.

With me, what I suggest is using a lot of variety of muscle groups in your hands and your arms. When I work on a full stroke, I talk about the different muscle groups that make up a stroke, and that is an arm motion, a wrist motion, and a finger motion. And you could start with just eight notes per hand and work on these muscle groups, starting with maybe some fingers, which we talk about just basically not moving any part of your arm or your wrist and moving around your thumb to create a finger stroke. Something like this.

A little bit faster.

And then working into wrist strokes, which would be more from just this and maybe even holding down your fingers on the stick for a little while ti just get your wrist moving like this.

And then finally working on some arm strokes. Now this might look a little silly, because you're over-using your arm. However, if you work on that, and especially coming from this area of your arm using your shoulder, you'll move your entire arm a little bit faster like this.

Now these individual muscle groups are not necessarily new techniques for you. It's just to work up the muscle groups so that they all come together as one. It's almost like throwing a ball. You throw your arm back. You release the ball. And you have all muscle groups involved. So when you do a full stroke, all your muscle groups are involved.

The more you work your muscle groups in combinations with both arms, the more you're going to get control and speed from your hands.

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